Tag Archives: Netflix

Suggestions for Netflix profile improvements

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As you may have heard, Netflix is beginning to crack down on password sharing. You may have already received the email inviting you to pay an extra eight dollars per month for additional households on your account. Even though Netflix tacitly (or even actively in some cases) encouraged password sharing for many years, I don’t hold this against them. On the other hand, they could definitely make life a lot easier by making profiles shareable.

Sharing profiles

The prime (heh) example comes from my house. I share my account with my ex wife because we have joint custody of the kids. This allows them to keep track of where they are in a show no matter which house they happen to be watching at. If I could share the profile, then I’d have no reason to share the account.

But I thought of another idea as I tried to describe this to the customer support representative. Profile sharing would make it much easier to travel or visit a friend’s house. If you could temporarily share your profile with another account, then it’s easy to use your profile at someone else’s place. This is less of a hassle, in theory, than logging out the owner, logging yourself in, and hoping you remember to log yourself out when you’re done.

Combining accounts

Another frustration is that you can’t move a profile to an existing account. When Netfix says “People move. Families grow. Relationships end. But throughout these life changes, your Netflix experience should stay the same.” what they mean is “you can always move a profile to a new account, you can never combine accounts.” Did you move in with someone who already had an account and you want to combine them? Too bad! One or both of you need to lose your profile.

I get why they have this ratchet. More accounts means more money. Combining accounts means they get less money. But also it’s kind of shitty. When Netflix was the only(-ish) game in town, it didn’t really matter. But now there are many streaming choices and people are starting to think “hey, maybe I don’t need to subscribe to all of them!” Content choices matter the most, of course, but customer experience matters, too.

The lesson

If you want to please your customers and your product has personalization, you have to consider all of the ways that the personalization might need to be portable. Making it easy to create a new account is important, and can help you get more money. But making it easy to manage profiles in a way that fits how people’s lives actually work is an investment in long-term customer satisfaction.

Hands-on with the Roku Streaming Stick

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Two years ago, my wife and I decided that we didn’t really watch enough TV to justify a cable subscription. With a baby in the house, we tended to have the music channels on more than anything else. A Pandora subscription (that I already had) was more than a suitable replacement and Netflix could provide enough video to keep us entertained. So I bought a Boxee Box and we cut the cord. The Boxee Box was more expensive than other options, but it had the ability to stream from local media, which I thought would be a critical feature. As it turns out, we never used that.

It wasn’t too long after we bought the Boxee Box that Boxee decided to go in a different direction. The Boxee continued to work, but no more updates were coming. This meant not getting Netflix profiles. It meant that some streaming websites (particularly ESPN) no longer worked in the browser. And as I discovered at the beginning of baseball season, it meant no more MLB.tv.

That was the last straw. Since Roku had recently released their streaming stick, I decided to order one. At $50, it was far less than I had paid for the Boxee Box, and it supported everything we used on Boxee, plus additional content. I was pretty excited when I set it up. The excitement didn’t last long. I apparently got a lemon. Fortunately, the Roku technical support folks were helpful, and I had a replacement unit sent. The replacement has worked well for the last two weeks.

There was no particular reason I went for the streaming stick over other form factors. My TV can’t provide power directly, so I still have to plug it in to the wall. But it was cheap and relatively novel, so I figured “why not?” The streaming stick is a little under-powered; it takes considerably longer for Netflix to load than the Boxee Box did. It also lacks the QWERTY keyboard that was an excellent (albeit un-lit) feature of the Boxee Box’s remote. However, that’s the sum of my dislikes.

Roku has a large variety of apps, but unlike the Boxee, they aren’t all pre-installed. That means you only have to wade through the apps you want to use. Unlike Boxee’s apps, there are more than two that we use on the Roku. PBS and PBS Kids were immediate additions, as was NASA TV (my daughter is really into space right now). Weather Underground’s app is nice, when we bother to use it. The Pandora and Netflix apps work quite well. And, of course, MLB.tv allows me to get my fix of Orioles baseball. Since we got the Roku, the Boxee Box has remained off. This means no more loud fan noises, no more sudden jumps in Netflix volume, and no more having to manually shut it off when the shutdown menu doesn’t work. Clearly the Roku streaming stick was the right decision.

Is Netflix streaming greener?

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Last month, TreeHugger ran an article asking if Netflix streaming is greener than DVD-by-mail. The conclusion that the author presented is that DVD-by-mail is the greener option. I don’t necessarily disagree with the conclusion, but I have serious issues with the path to get there. Perhaps I’m judging it too harshly — it is, after all, a web article, not a scientific paper. It may be too much to ask for rigor in entertainment (Randall Munroe would agree, and I’m certainly guilty of hand-waving at times), but if we’re going to pretend to answer the question definitively, let’s put some effort into it.

The most obvious problem with the article is that “greener” is never defined. The author focuses on CO2 emissions, so I guess that’s the measure being used. While CO2 is valid, it’s hardly the only consideration in determining the environmental impact of Netflix. The DVDs must be manufactured and the shipping envelopes don’t get reused. For streaming, the hardware needs to be manufactured. These all require resources, both renewable and non-renewable. Even the CO2 emissions aren’t created equal if one considers the cost of extracting the oil needed to power the vehicles and the coal used to power the datacenters.

In “calculating” the CO2 output of streaming a Netflix movie, the author uses an entirely different kind of service and says that Netflix must generate more CO2 than that. That’s quite possible, but where’s the proof? In fact, a previous post by the same author says “[a]n even more efficient option is on-demand movies on cable, or movie downloading.” I’m now confused. Is streaming more efficient or is it a greater contributor to anthropogenic CO2 production?

It’s interesting and thought-provoking to ask if Netflix (or other similar services) is less-impactful in streaming or physical form. The article did a great service asking the question, but an incredible disservice in answering it. The answer is more complicated than a few quick calculations. It may prove that DVD-by-mail really is the “greener” option. I don’t know, but neither does Pablo Paster.